"Deep Throat" And The FBI

In 1972, a porno movie called Deep Throat was released in the United States. It wasn't a very good movie. Like most pornos, it had a lot of explicit sex scenes with only a glimmer of a plot and a lot of bad acting. It only cost $25,000 to make, but would up making hundreds of millions of dollars. Nearly 40 years later, it is still the most famous porno movie ever made.

Why did a run-of-the-mill porno movie acheive such fame and extreme profitably? The authorities of that time can take credit for that. Authorities at every level (local, state and federal) all across the nation, picked this movie to demonize as the worst of the pornos. They wanted to ban this movie, and use it to ban pornos in general. They failed miserably.

All they did was make the movie famous (or infamous). And as usual, when authorities try to ban a book or movie, it just makes people want to read or see it. People who normally wouldn't have considered going to see a porno movie all of a sudden just had to see this movie. Everyone wanted to see what the authorities were making such a big fuss about.

One of the police agencies that tried to stop the movie was the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), but I don't think most people realized the extent of the FBI's involvement. According to documents released to the Associated Press recently, the FBI had a 5,800 page file on the movie's director.

Memo's showed the involvement reached from nearly every FBI field office to the highest levels of the FBI. According to the AP, "Agents seized copies of the movie, had negatives analyzed in labs and interviewed everyone from actors and producers to messengers who delivered reels to theaters."

Today, it would be unimaginable for the FBI to waste this much time and resources on investigating a porno movie, but 1972 was a different time. At that time, the FBI considered itself not only a policing agency, but also the guardian of America's culture and morals. Mark Weiner, a law professor at Rutgers, says, "The story of 'Deep Throat' is the story of the last gasp of the forces lined up against the cultural and sexual revolution and it is the advent of the entry of pornography into the mainstream."

One of the most ironic things about the investigation was that the FBI's second-in-command, W. Mark Felt, was one of those who received copies of all the investigative memos. A few years later, he would be nicknamed "Deep Throat" because of his revelations about White House wrongdoings to reporter Bob Woodward.